Friday, October 2, 2009

Sharing Library Resources: Yet Another Benefit of Coworking

I have a small library at home, but I prefer to separate my home from my work and thus had to bring those books to my office at The Network Hub. Recently, I brought a few books to my office that are particularly relevant to my work.

When I first moved to The Network Hub, it surprised me a bit to learn that the shared office space has a small area with books. Given that The Network Hub has an open space floor plan, anybody from the group of entrepreneurs and companies hosted here can access those books. Obviously, the honor system (where you take a book and you bring it back) works well in this particular coworking space.

Books, magazines and a variety of learning resources are an integral cornerstone of university libraries and research centres. Individual research and teaching departments (like Linguistics, Political Science, Geography) usually have a reading room where graduate students and faculty can access books, journals, magazines and other learning materials that may either be in high demand at the university library or simply, more relevant to the area of study within the department.

It hadn’t dawned on me how important it was to share library resources amongst entrepreneurs until a couple of days ago, when Amin (another entrepreneur whose company has offices here at The Network Hub) asked me if he could borrow a book of mine. And at that point (yes, recently, just a few days ago) it became clear to me that being able to access a collective pool of learning resources (including books/magazines/journals/articles) is yet another benefit of coworking.